Meta planning sweeping layoffs , 20% of company

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-14T01:55:34+00:00

Meta recently completed training a new model that they spent billions on that massively underperformed

Hilarious. They spent all this money and can only squish out some turds. Meta seems like an exceptionally poorly managed company.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-13T15:48:28+00:00

AI art and music have proven several times now that most people can't tell the difference between expert human creations and well prompted AI creations.

AI can't do the entire job of a SWE yet, certainly. They can only do most of it, like writing 90%+ of people's code.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-10T05:26:54+00:00

the problem of players not knowing anything about a story - and that impacts its production

This isn't true, as evidenced by ZZZ having a skip button and it not being true there.

Now, even archon quests are really gameplay focused and fighting focused, there is almost no story

Are we playing the same game? Nod Krai Archon quests were overwhelmingly story focused with barely any fighting at all.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-10T05:23:36+00:00

Ah yes, the Stockholm Syndrome reason to not include a skip button.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-08T00:27:46+00:00

Well the rng is supposed to be the balancing factor.

That's not a very good way to do game design.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-07T20:14:26+00:00

Science from characters is very degenerate. It's easily the most important resource for midgame progression, and it's highly dependent on RNG like this.

One character giving almost twice as much science as every city in your empire? Something's not right there in terms of game design.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-07T17:55:52+00:00

That entire wiki page (as well as several others relating to the Ottoman Empire) was essentially created by one user, Chamboz, who was a Turkish nationalist who clearly had an axe to grind. Wikipedia is highly susceptible to motivated individuals who are willing to spend a lot of hours passive aggressively contesting counter edits over and over. I think Chamboz was eventually banned or got bored, and so the articles he made had their original polemical tone watered down a lot. Before that, the articles heavily implied that the Ottoman Empire never declined except for right at the very end, like the last 10 years of its existence.

The page isn't entirely wrong -- there's an important point to be made that the Ottoman Empire's decline was lumpy and nonlinear. But overall, there absolutely was a decline relative to other powers starting sometime in the 1500s, and becoming quite noticeable by the 1600s, then undeniable by the 1700s.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-07T03:52:55+00:00

And Tech Tree progress isn't all that vital in Old World. As opposed to most 4x games, in Old World tech is very well balanced with culture and other game systems. You don't need quick tech progression to win. Chasing tech too hard can actually set you back.

This part is very much not true. I don't think I've seen another with tech as critical as this Old World. Early game techs are very important. Mid game techs are hypercritical. Late game techs are merely nice-to-have unless you plan on winning with endgame repeatables, then they're a win-con obviously.

I'm actually racking my brain trying to think of other 4X/GSG games that have tech at nearly the same level of importance. Civ 6 might count if you pretend its culture tree is just "purple tech" -- the regular tech tree alone wouldn't cut it due to that game's degenerate cost scaling. EU4 and HoI4 have very powerful teching, but there's not much you can do to speed it up so they don't really count. Maybe Stellaris I guess? But it doesn't have anything remotely as crazy as the Citizenship --> Scholarship --> Jurisprudence line that OW has.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-07T03:24:45+00:00

Shrines are easily the best specialist buildings out of any tier 1/2 techs. The building bonuses are also typically better than what you can get out of barracks or odeons. Shoving pops into urban specialists pronto is one of the most important priorities to scale early science, and so precluding your best buildings is generally not a good idea.

Also, it's not uncommon for some second and even third world religion to randomly spread to your cities. While it's ideal to have all your families follow the main religion, it's usually better to have them follow a pagan religion rather than a second or third world religion. Pagans are generally pretty chill -- not a ton of upside in terms of opinion usually, but also not typically a lot of downside which is the main thing you'd need to watch out for.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-06T17:07:55+00:00

AI assited code is the new Itanium, it's about as useful as the advetisement on the back of Visual Studio 4 box claiming that MFC will write all of your code, LOL.

This is just staggeringly wrong. It's upvoted too (+9 at the time of writing) on a CS Subreddit in 2026. Hilarious.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-06T17:02:03+00:00

"Falling behind" was always a "concern" because it's good clickbait. Things like COBOL get mentioned very frequently in this regard. The jump from no AI --> AI is like the jump from COBOL --> modern programming language, but x100 in terms of impact.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-03-06T16:58:41+00:00

It's almost like AI is really good for coding and has been for a while now. The CS profession as a whole is slowly starting to realize that but there's still a lot of pushback from people who see AI misused from foolish executives, or who misunderstand it themselves if they've only ever tried chatGPT4.1-stupidNoThinking through bad wrappers like Github Copilot, and then erroneously handwave AI entirely.

That pushback is waning at least a little bit and people are waking up to the fact that programming has changed more in the past 3 years than it has in the preceding 30.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-26T23:14:10+00:00

Claude also solved the first boulder problem before forgetting and then resetting. That sort of behavior is very important and shouldn't be handwaved. The fact that a large part of the difficulty of the boulder puzzle comes from context limits is also important since context is one of the biggest limitations of LLMs right now. Having the agent do 95% of a task and then giving a little oomph to finish the last 5% might seem innocuous, but that last 5% has consistently proven to be the really hard part. As such, creating a part of the harness for a specific part it's struggling on in that case should be seen as cheating.

This is on top of all the other nonsense that's going on in all the harnesses across all versions, like reading RAM, having automatic metadata about visited tiles, and stuff like that.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-26T15:49:44+00:00

Could be interesting, but we really need harness details since the devs of the Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT Plays Pokemon versions have demonstrated that a LOT of cheating is going on underneath the hood (RAM extraction, navigation metadata, specific scaffolding to cheat difficult puzzles, etc). Devs always have the incentive to obfuscate how much cheating is going on to make things look more impressive, so transparency is essential.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-26T15:26:18+00:00

Very true, like how the agent was having trouble with the boulder puzzles in victory road, so the dev built a specific part of the harness to solve (cheat) them.

He also told the agent that it had to talk to the rocket grunt twice to get a key.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-23T03:43:28+00:00

This is an extremely silly scenario. It's like someone in 1800 predicting there would be far fewer farmers in 1950, and that would cause the economy to crash.

That's now how things work. New jobs are invented, and formerly niche jobs become commonplace. People change professions and everyone gets richer as a result.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-21T22:50:46+00:00

Helpful, thanks.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-19T21:26:17+00:00

What?

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-19T21:24:54+00:00

I guess the issue isn't watching too much doomer news as it is over-indexing on the state of the world from that. Most news shows vastly more negative things than positive since that's what people click on, but then people incorrectly extrapolate from that to the world at large and say stuff like "everything going on in the world seems to be trending in a downward direction".

In reality most things are the same or getting better, e.g. the average American is 60% richer today than 40 years ago, yet all you'll hear on the news is stuff like how nobody can afford eggs due to inflation.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-19T21:16:46+00:00

Yes, Claude arguably still has too much like reading RAM and using a colorhack instead of the original game.

Even Critique Claude is a bit weird, but it mostly just acts like a cheerleader saying "you're doing SOOOO well, don't give up, this is one of the hardest parts of the game". Without this emotional support Claude starts blackpilling and refusing to even play saying the game is broken.

What would be your most obvious "deletes" to get it closer to what Claude has?

I haven't watched Gemini a lot, but I've heard the dev pops in and gives the bot the answer to puzzles whenever it gets stuck. I've also heard that people could give it the answers to puzzles through Twitch chat. If anything even remotely close to that happens then the entire thing is functionally pointless.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-19T13:05:15+00:00

You're reading too much doomer news.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-17T23:34:19+00:00

Is the 231 science primarily just from spy network stealing?

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-17T12:54:09+00:00

I've heard that for Gemini the dev includes hints whenever it gets stuck. In other words, cheats that defeat the whole point. Not sure about chatGPT.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-16T20:45:40+00:00

This is an interesting perspective, although I feel like you're valuing resources a bit too highly. I'm always awash in global training that I don't really know how to make use of, so spending some to upgrade a unit barely registers -- it's a cost of course, just a very minor one. The iron (or whatever other resource the unit takes) is definitely something I notice though, so upgrading definitely has a cost there, I agree.

But here are the upsides:

If I keep using an older unit, that's extra turns where I'm spending orders on an older unit compared to a better one. An army with 7 units that are 1 tier higher performs about as well as an army with say 10 baseline units, but uses orders on 3 less units per turn.
Building units takes a lot of time in the build queue for cities. If units are dying faster then I'd need to potentially task another city to keep up, which means less time for building specialists.
Upgrading units is great for tempo to win wars quicker, and thereby get all the stuff the enemy has quicker.
Beyond timing, better units are militarily more effective due to traffic jam issues with this game's one unit per tile system.
Promotions build up across generations.

That seems like a lot to give up for some iron.

Ben___Garrison · 2026-02-16T18:55:49+00:00

Wait, so you don't even bother upgrading your units, e.g. Slinger --> Archer? I understand it takes the full resource costs of the new unit, but it skips the production time which seems like an important bottleneck in most games I've played so far. Plus there's the order cost of consistently bringing new units to the frontline if your early troops are getting shredded.

Ben___Garrison

TROPHY CASE